Microsoft wins key ISO certification

Microsoft has won a controversial 15-month battle to have a key document format approved as a global industry standard, smoothing the way for lucrative government procurement contracts.

Although the decision by the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) has yet to be formally announced, documents seen by the Financial Times indicate that 86 per cent of its member national bodies have voted in favour of approving the standard.

Microsoft failed to secure the two-thirds majority needed in the original ballot in September but has managed to get several ISO member countries to change their votes after an intensive lobbying campaign. Countries that changed their votes in the second and final round included the UK, Ireland, Denmark and South Korea.

Microsoft has been pushing hard for international certification for its Open Office XML, the default file format for Microsoft Office 2007, to improve its chances of winning government work.

Many governments are concerned about being dependent on one company’s proprietary standard for publishing public documents, and have made moves to switch to rival “open” standards, such as ODF, which was developed by Sun Microsystems and is supported by IBM and Google.

ODF received approval from ISO two years ago, putting pressure on Microsoft to get similar approval for its own format.

“Ratification of Open Office XML makes it easier for governments to chose this format. The ISO decision sends a message that the global community has embraced this standard,” said Tom Robertson, head of standards at Microsoft.

Opponents of the standard, however, pointed out that several large countries, including India, China and Brazil had steadfastly opposed Microsoft’s plans.

“It means that countries representing a third or half of the world’s population have resisted the pressure to approve this,” said Michiel Leenaars, strategy manager at NLnet, a Dutch non-government organisation that promotes the development of open source software.

The ISO voting process has been dogged by controversy and allegations of committee stuffing by both sides of the debate. National standards bodies, which usually have six or seven people voting on standards, suddenly saw 20 or 30 members joining ahead of the ballot.

Microsoft admits it encouraged its partners to participate in the voting but had not funded them to do so.

Nevertheless, the controversy prompted a European Commission investigation into the process last month.

The initial September vote in Sweden was declared invalid after one member was discovered to have voted twice, while in Norway, the former chairman of the technical committee has asked the country’s Ministry of Trade and Industry to investigate “irregularities” in the recent round of ­voting.

Norway was also one of the countries that changed its vote from “no” to “yes” in the final round.

Some of the countries that changed their vote said they hoped to have more control over the Microsoft standard if it became part of ISO.